Divided panel endorses Sotomayor

Wednesday

Jul 29, 2009 at 12:01 AMJul 29, 2009 at 11:37 AM

WASHINGTON -- A Senate committee endorsed Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor yesterday in a vote that splintered nearly along party lines, signaling that Republicans will not hesitate to oppose the first Latino nominee to the nation's highest court when the full Senate decides whether to confirm her next week.

WASHINGTON -- A Senate committee endorsed Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor yesterday in a vote that splintered nearly along party lines, signaling that Republicans will not hesitate to oppose the first Latino nominee to the nation's highest court when the full Senate decides whether to confirm her next week.

Only one Republican joined the Senate Judiciary Committee's dozen Democrats in supporting Sotomayor. The six GOP senators who stood against her included two from states with heavy Latino populations and two veteran senators who had never voted against a Supreme Court nominee.

Republicans and Democrats alike said that, in a Senate with a heavy Democratic majority that is united behind Sotomayor, her confirmation is virtually assured.

Yet, the sharp division evident in the committee attests to the increasingly partisan nature of Supreme Court confirmations. The votes against Sotomayor came despite several Republicans having acknowledged in her confirmation hearings two weeks ago that her record in 11 years as a federal appeals judge is not especially liberal.

According to court-watchers on and off Capitol Hill, the vote also pointed to a political calculation that many Senate Republicans are likely to make: that there is less political risk in potentially angering Latinos, the nation's largest minority group, than in disregarding intense pressure from conservative constituencies such as the National Rifle Association that oppose her confirmation.

GOP strategists and senior Senate aides challenged the conventional wisdom that a vote against the first Latino nominee could be politically dangerous. "I thought that voting for someone or not voting for someone based on their ethnicity or sex went out of fashion 40 years ago," said Don Stewart, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Sotomayor is President Barack Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court. In addition to being the court's first Latina, she would become the third female member in its history. When Obama selected her in May, he emphasized her life story: rising from a poor childhood with a widowed mother in a Bronx housing project to attend two Ivy League universities and eventually become a judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was the only Republican on the committee to side with the Democrats, and only four other GOP senators have said they plan to support Sotomayor.

McConnell says he will vote against her.

Some GOP senators have not disclosed how they intend to vote.

The partisan divide over Sotomayor contrasts with confirmations of the nominees of the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed in 1993 with only three dissenting votes, and only nine senators voted against confirming Stephen Breyer a year later.

Yesterday's vote was more polarized than the Judiciary Committee's September 2005 vote on John G. Roberts Jr., now the court's chief justice. Then, three Democrats joined Republicans in favor of his confirmation.

But in January 2006, the panel split along party lines over Justice Samuel Alito.

Yesterday, Graham, a southern conservative, was the only Republican who argued for bipartisanship and deference to a president's preference for the nation's highest court.

Graham called her "left of center but certainly within the mainstream."

"She can be no worse than Souter from our point of view," he said, referring to conservatives' view of David Souter, the retiring court member whom Sotomayor would replace.

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